When Neanderthals and Modern Humans Met, long book review Options

When Neanderthals and Modern Humans Met
Nicholas J. Conard (ed.)
Tübingen: Tübingen Publications in Prehistory, Kerns Verlag, 2006, 501
pp. (hardback), $68.50.
ISBN: 3935751036.
Reviewed by JULIEN RIEL-SALVATORE
Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Stephen Leacock
Building Rm. 717, 855 Sherbrooke St. W., Montréal, Québec H3A 2T7,
CANADA; julien.rielsalvat...@mail.mcgill.ca
When Neanderthals and Modern Humans Met comprises 20 papers first
presented in the context of a conference
held in Tübingen in 2004 on the nature of the interactions
between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons (i.e., Homo sapiens sapiens)
during the interval commonly referred to as the Middle-Upper
Paleolithic Transition. Edited by Nicholas Conard, this book
constitutes a wide-ranging and eclectic (in the best sense of the
term) compendium of studies
representing where our understanding of the Middle-Upper Paleolithic
transition stands at the close of the first decade of the 21st
century. In that sense, the book's goal to present how far studies of
the interaction between Neanderthals
and modern humans--at least presumably, as the fossil record is all too
scant for this time period--have come since 1856 is met with great
success.
While the book's overall production value is very high, it does
contains a few typos and illustrations are of unequal quality across
contributions. This does not, however, detract
from the wealth of information it contains about the 'transitional'
record of Eurasia, from the Iberian Peninsula to the Russian plains,
and almost every point in between. As such, it is a must-have for the
library of any researcher seriously engaged in 'transition studies,'
as it provides not only abundant new data about the
paleoanthropological record of this crucial time period, but also some
new and very promising perspectives from which to approach what may
seem to some to have become a threadbare issue.
The volume opens with an introductory chapter by Conard who draws a
provocative pan-Eurasian picture of how contacts between Neanderthals
and modern humans--
when and where they happened--likely unfolded, and of the various
behavioral mechanisms which enabled modern humans to outcompete
Neanderthals throughout their range. This is followed by a paper by
Weniger who reviews broadly what the empirical record allows us to say
about population dynamics across the transition and that it is
important to base any interpretations first and foremost on those
coarse-grained data rather than on preconceived notions of how
Neanderthals must have disappeared. This theme is also touched upon by
Haidle, albeit from a very different perspective--she argues that
Neanderthals are consistently construed as the stereotypical "other"
in most narratives of modern human origins and that, as in many works
of fiction, prevalent scenarios about their interaction with modern
humans reflect tacit preconceptions and the tendency of framing
encounters in us-versus-them terms.
The next two chapters are among the best contributions
to the volume and are likely to become requisite reading
for all paleoanthropologists. In Chapter 4, O'Connell uses four cases,
drawn from ethnography and archaeology,
of replacement of one forager group by another to derive test
implications about what may have facilitated a replacement of
Neanderthal by modern humans in the Paleolithic. Although not
accounting for all of the nuances of the Early Upper Paleolithic
record, this approach admirably
highlights the proper referential basis on which we should be building
models of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer interactions, as opposed to
drawing from inappropriate analogies from European colonization of the
Americas and Australia. In Chapter 5, Hovers presents a very
thoughtful discussion of ecological theory to recast the parameters of
Neanderthal-modern human interaction and suggests that, as congruent
competitors, they likely coexisted in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
This perspective has the advantage of accounting for the very similar
archaeological signatures
of the two groups of hominins over tens of millennia, a situation
Hovers rightly emphasizes is quite distinct from that of Europe during
the transition interval.
In the next chapter, Bräuer presents a critical evaluation of claims
about the possibility of a substantial genetic contribution
of Neanderthals to the gene pool of early European
modern humans. He concludes that the identification of Neanderthal
features in Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens is largely unconvincing,
based as it is on misleading assessment
of certain features and/or on using features which he considers
problematic. He concludes that there was likely only a very modest
amount of gene flow between the two groups. In Chapter 7, Hublin and
Bailey seek to address much the same issue, but approach it from the
opposite perspective, namely by looking for modern features in late
Neanderthals remains. They conclude that, especially when features
linked to strong genetic signals are given primacy, there is little
convincing evidence for interbreeding or in situ evolution towards
modern human morphology. The conclusions of these two studies stand in
notable contrast to those of Trinkaus and colleagues (Chapter 9) who
present
new details about the context and morphology of the Peºtera cu Oase
early modern human remains. These authors
conclude that the presence of archaic features in these specimens
indicates phylogenetic affinities to some kind of archaic hominin
group, likely Neanderthals.
Bocherens and Drucker (Chapter 8) present new stable isotope evidence
to address the question of Neanderthal and early modern human diet and
its inferential link to potential
dietary competition between the two groups. They complement their
analyses of hominin dietary patterns by
PaleoAnthropology 2008: 88-90. (c) Source PDF

When Neanderthals and Modern Humans Met, long book review Options